Various products including hard disk drives utilize a read channel device to retrieve information from a medium and decode and convert the information to a digital data format. Such read channel devices may include data processing circuits including an analog to digital converter along with a data detector circuit. The ability to detect the original stored data patterns in the received data samples from the analog to digital converter is important to the accurate transfer of data.
In a conventional oversampled data processing circuit, a continuous analog signal is sampled in the analog to digital converter at a rate greater than or equal to twice the baud rate. The resulting samples are low pass filtered and decimated to form a baud rate sequence. However, there is typically no significant bit error rate performance improvement between the conventional oversampled data processing circuit and a non-oversampled system or baud rate system.
The push toward low-cost, high-performance data transfer systems is resulting in tight constraints on latency and power dissipation of the read channel circuits. At the same time, there is a corresponding push to transfer higher density data patterns. This often requires detection of transferred data in a reduced signal to noise ratio environment. In this environment, current data processing circuits may not offer sufficient speed or accuracy.
Thus, for at least the aforementioned reason, there exists a need in the art for improving data detection in data processing circuits.